Misper

Bea Davenport

Description

I knew this girl, you see. A sort of a friend. No one thought she really mattered much, but that turned out to be a mistake. Because she blew a hole through my life - and the lives of everyone I knew.Anna's found the perfect friend in Zoe: she's cool, she's smart, she's goth, she's gorgeous. If only geeky Kerry would stop hanging around and cramping their style. They'd like to get rid of her. But they should be careful what they wish for...The Misper by best-selling crime and children's writer Bea Davenport is a gripping story of obsessive friendships, jealousies, bullying - and the consequences of your actions.

Sujets

• Children's

Informations

• Publié par: The Conrad Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912317196
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Misper
BEA DAVENPORT


The Misper
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2018
Tel: [phone]
www.theconradpress.com
[e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-912317-19-6
Copyright © Bea Davenport, 2018
The moral right of Bea Davenport to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Typesetting and Cover Design by:Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.


1
Good cop, bad cop
T oday’s a new start.
At least, it’s supposed to be all new, but people keep on blurting out the same old stuff. Fresh page. Line-in-the-sand. Put-the-past-behind-you. It would be a good sign if someone said just one thing I haven’t heard before. Just one thing, you know? Surprise me.
It might be new, but it feels old. All schools smell the same, of sweat and Dettol and don’t-wanna-be-here . The stench wafts out of the reception area. I’m hovering outside while little groups and cliques wander past me, shaking off the rain, talking and laughing and squealing and all of that. Some kids turn their heads to stare, but most of them don’t even see me at all. I turn to see Mum give me the thumbs-up. She spent about half an hour fussing around me this morning, even straightening my frizzy hair and letting me use a dab of make-up to cover a zit.
Usually she’d say, ‘It’s only school, Anna, not a catwalk.’ My heavy eyeliner and dark-painted nails are definitely off limits. Mum wants me to make a good impression. And she’s going to stand there with that fixed smile, getting wetter and wetter, until I go inside, so I guess I’d better move. I raise my hand in something like a wave, hold my breath and follow some kids in through the toughened glass doors.
Over and over in my head, I’m thinking what I should tell anyone who asks about my last school or where I used to live. The thing not to say is that I’m trying to escape. Or that I’m running away from someone who isn’t even around anymore.
I knew this girl, you see. A sort of a friend. No one thought she really mattered much, but that turned out to be a mistake. Because she blew a hole through my life – and the lives of everyone I knew.
Last November 3
It was just after four o’clock in the afternoon and it was pretty dark. There were smells of gunpowder in the air, because the kids had been setting off fireworks every day since the shops started selling them. Any day at school was bad enough without Zoe. And usually any day without Kerry was a good one. But everything had been off its head today, like a weird dream where everything you think you know is not quite right. The best parts of the day were when no one was talking to me at all. The worst parts were when people asked me questions. Three-thirty couldn’t come quickly enough and I’d part-run, part-walked home so fast I was out of breath. And there was a police car outside my house.
I stopped dead and took some big mouthfuls of air. It tasted of fumes, fireworks and frost. My first thought was to turn and walk away again, in the opposite direction. I almost did it. But then I pictured the inside of the house: Mum putting out the best tea cups and searching the cupboard for some good biscuits for the police officers. She’d have that worry-frown on her forehead, so deep it hurt me to look at it. Every minute waiting for me would make it worse. So I reached for my front door key. It slipped in my damp hand.
They were the same officers who came round yesterday… and someone else. The light-haired woman detective and the fat bloke who was her sidekick. They were just what you see in the films — good cop, bad cop. I knew how they worked. She tried to get me to tell her what happened, by pretending to be my friend. He tried to get me to tell him what happened, by pretending he already knew and that he could see right through me. They said, ‘Hello again, Anna.’ And I guessed there was no good news.
The woman cop gave me that sympathetic smile. The fat bloke already had my mum’s china cup in his fat fist and was dunking a biscuit in his tea. And the circles round my mum’s eyes looked so dark, you’d think she’d drawn them on. All these things made me feel guilty: her smile, his sneer, Mum’s face. Even though I didn’t actually do anything. No good telling that to the cops. After all, somebody did something to Kerry. Whatever it was.
I said there was someone else there, too, this time. Another woman, younger, with spiky hair the colour of apricots and a row of earrings in each lobe. She looked like a scarecrow that’d been pushed into a skirt suit from Oxfam. They introduced her as Jenny and they rattled on about psychology. It turned out my mum agreed this woman can talk to me. A nut doctor. Great .
‘You’ve been running,’ said the lady cop. I raised my eyes and I stopped myself from saying: ‘Well done, Sherlock Holmes,’ only because Mum was in the room. The friendly one was called Sandra. Her hair was in the sleekest bob you ever saw, like she ironed it along with her blinding-white shirts. I just shrugged. I didn’t want to say anything more than I had to.
‘Well. Get your breath back,’ she went on. ‘I thought you and I might go for a little walk and have a chat.’
‘I don’t want to.’
My mum said: ‘Anna!’ in a hiss. I didn’t want to
see her face so I just stared down at the tablecloth, the best green tablecloth. I stared until its pattern blurred.
‘If I’d said that to a policeman when I was your age I’d have got a crack round the head,’ said the fat one. He smiled to make it sound like a joke. ‘We don’t bite, pet. We just have to find out what happened to Kerry.’
I looked over to Sandra, who gave me a wink, as if we were somehow in this together. She stood up. ‘Come on, we’ll leave Rob to get even fatter on your mum’s nice biscuits. Let’s go out for a bit of air.’
Jenny stood up too. My mum gave me one of those tiny little digs in the back. It was like, Behave yourself. Don’t make things worse.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Sandra added.
It was darker and the pinch of cold in the air made my eyes water. The three of us walked down past the row of houses and I didn’t have to be told which way to go. The Cut. Scene of the crime or scene of the whatever-it-was that really happened. Maybe.
‘I guess you’re having a tough time.’ Sandra had a sigh in her voice.
I shrugged back. ‘You guess right then. No wonder you’re a copper.’
Silence. Then: ‘Anna,’ she said. ‘I’m not having a go at you. I know it must be terrible for you. Don’t treat me like an enemy. I just have to find out what happened. It’s my job.’
‘You’re not doing it very well, then, are you?’ I expected her to get angry, but she just laughed.
‘You’re right. I’m not, am I? But think about this. If you’re having a tough time, how do you think it is for Kerry’s mum? And the rest of her family?’
I kept my eyes down and under my feet the paving stones seemed to slide along of their own accord. When I first moved to our street I was a bit scared of Kerry’s mum. She was really strict with Kerry and I could see why Kerry didn’t argue back. She had black shiny hair, cut short and boxy like a man. She was – not fat, not really, but sort of square. You wouldn’t rugby-tackle her ’cause you’d lose. I once heard my mum call her ‘buxom’ which I thought was a hilarious word. She didn’t say it to her face, of course.
That morning, though, when I was about to go to school, Kerry’s mum wandered out of her house, just wearing her dressing gown and slippers. Somehow in the space of two nights she’d turned into a different person. She didn’t look square-shaped any more. Her skin kind of hung off her face. She started walking up and down and shouting for Kerry, until Kerry’s dad came out, took her arm and walked her back inside. I hid behind the fence until her door closed.
We reached The Cut. The Cut is what it says it is, a little cinder path between Scrogg’s Field and the other side of our housing estate. It’s the sort of place parents tell their kids not to go on their own. They do go, of course, sometimes for a dare more than anything. No one used it when it rained because it was a total mud bath and you couldn’t tell the wet soil from all the dog dirt.
There were stories about The Cut. They said a man kicked a dog in the head and left it to die in there. The older kids used to tell the little ones that you could sometimes still hear the ghost-dog whining, at nights.
Sometimes Zoe and I used it as a quick way home from school. Not today, though, obviously. It had police tape around it and an officer in uniform standing at the entrance. Sandra nodded at him and he stood back to let her past.
She switched on a torch and beckoned me. It was the smell I noticed first. That mixture of earth and rotting leaves and dog wee, saturating the cold air. I shuddered. ‘It stinks.’
‘Places like these always stink,’ Sandra said.
The frost had hardened the mud quite a bit, so walking was OK. Sandra swished through the leaves and branches, sharp and still icy-wet. She kept moving her torchlight around. ‘OK, Anna. So you all came in here on Hallowe’en night?’
I’d already been dragged through this story, so many times since Sunday that I’d l